Stalin and His Hangmen: The Tyrant and Those Who Killed for Him

Ezhov was moved in 1923—by Kalinin, Rykov, and three of Stalin’s satraps, Kaganovich, Kuibyshev, and Andreev—to another ethnic hornet’s nest: Semipalatinsk, then a city in the vast Kazakh-Kirgiz republic. Ezhov, at most thirty years old, became the party chief of a province ravaged by starving Turkic nomads, bandits, and deserters. He coped, and was moved to Orenburg, then capital of Kazakh-Kirgizia; by 1926 he was a senior party official and a delegate to the fourteenth congress of the All-Union party. The Kazakhstan archaeologist and writer Iuri Dombrovsky, who survived several spells in the camps, liked Ezhov. “Many of my contemporaries, especially party members, came across him personally or through their work. There wasn’t a single one who had anything bad to say about him. He was a responsive, humane, soft, tactful person. He would always try to sort out any unpleasant personal problem privately, to put the brakes on things.” Another Kazakhstan party secretary, back from the GULAG, recalled that Ezhov “sang folk songs with feeling.”

At the end of 1925, at the party congress in Moscow, Ezhov stayed in a hotel with Ivan Mikhailovich Moskvin. As he was at daggers drawn with Zinoviev, Moskvin was the sole member of Leningrad’s administration whom Stalin promoted—to running the party’s organization and distribution section, headhunting administrators. Moskvin took to Ezhov as a fellow Leningrader. Ezhov wanted a Moscow posting, for Antonina had resumed her studies there in 1926, and in February 1927 Ezhov joined Moskvin’s section, where he amazed even the ascetic Moskvin by meeting every deadline and by his appetite for paperwork. After seven months, Ezhov became Moskvin’s deputy and almost an adopted son in the Moskvin family: Moskvin’s wife, Sofia, called him “sparrow.” Cuckoo would have been more appropriate, for ten years later Ivan and Sofia Moskvin would be shot, Ivan as a freemason, Sofia for no specific reason, on Ezhov’s orders. Moskvin’s son-in-law the writer Lev Razgon recalls Ezhov in 1927: “not at all like a vampire, he was a thin little man, always dressed in a cheap crumpled suit and a blue satin tunic. He would sit at the table, quiet, taciturn, a little shy, he drank little, did not interrupt, just listened, his head slightly inclined.” What Moskvin told Lev Razgon about Ezhov was clairvoyant: “I don’t know a more ideal worker, or rather executive. If you entrust him with anything you need not check up, you can be sure: he will do it all. Ezhov has only one fault, admittedly a fundamental one: he doesn’t know when to stop. . . . And sometimes one has to keep an eye on him in order to stop him in time.”

Ezhov was a real talent. The Tatar party secretary, a Russian Jew, asked for Ezhov as “a tough lad . . . to sort out the Tatars.” Kaganovich picked Ezhov to help in the collectivization campaign of autumn 1929 when 25,000 party members were mobilized to intimidate the peasantry; as deputy commissar for agriculture, Ezhov was among the most intimidating. Antonina, absorbed in her research into sugar beets, saw less and less of her husband. Ezhov, his temper frayed by overwork, looked elsewhere for consolation. The Ezhovs were nevertheless observed together in 1930 in Sukhum by Osip and Nadezhda Mandelstam; they were all staying, courtesy of Nestor Lakoba, at a villa near the Black Sea. Ezhov was to sanction Mandelstam’s last and fatal arrest; his widow would find it hard to believe that this “modest and rather pleasant man” who had given them lifts to town in his car and who danced with a limp, had become the organizer of Stalin’s holocaust. In Sukhum the Mandelstams heard of Mayakovsky’s suicide, an event that reawakened Mandelstam’s lyric inspiration. Russian party officials went on dancing; Georgian guests remarked that they would never dance on the day their national poet had died. Nadezhda Mandelstam relayed this to Ezhov, who promptly stopped the party.⁵ Ezhov played billiards with Lakoba, he danced, he sang—with perfect pitch and great feeling—he let his wife take Abkhaz peasant children for rides in his car, he obligingly took back with him to Moscow zoo a bear cub that Lakoba had been given. The amiable Antonina lounged in a deck chair, and Ezhov cut roses for more responsive women.